Aquinas' Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy

For Thomas Aquinas, as for Aristotle, doing moral philosophy is
thinking as generally as possible about what I should choose to do
(and not to do), considering my whole life as a field of
opportunity (or misuse of opportunity). Thinking as general as this
concerns not merely my own opportunities, but the kinds of
good things that any human being can do and achieve, or be deprived of.
Thinking about what to do is conveniently labeled
“practical”, and is concerned with what and how to choose
and do what one intelligently and reasonably can (i) to achieve
intelligible goods in one's own life and the lives of other human
beings and their environment, and (ii) to be of good character and live
a life that as a whole will have been a reasonable response to such
opportunities.

Political philosophy is, in one respect, simply that part or
extension of moral philosophy which considers the kinds of choice that
should be made by all who share in the responsibility and authority of
choosing for a community of the comprehensive kind called political. In
another respect, it is a systematic explanatory account of the forms of
political arrangement that experience and empirical observation show
are available, with their characteristic features, outcomes, and
advantages (and disadvantages and bad aspects and consequences). Though
in form descriptive and contemplative, and thus non-practical, this
aspect of political philosophy remains subordinate, in its
systematization or conceptual structure, to the categories one finds
necessary or appropriate when doing moral and political philosophy as
it should be done, that is, as practical thinking by one whose every
choice (even the choice to do nothing now, or the choice do moral or
political philosophy) should be a good use of opportunity.

Moral and political philosophy for Aquinas, then, is (1) the set or
sets of concepts and propositions which, as principles and precepts of
action, pick out the kinds of chosen action that are truly intelligent
and reasonable for human individuals and political communities,
together with (2) the arguments necessary to justify those concepts and
propositions in the face of doubts, or at least to defend them against
objections. It is a fundamentally practical philosophy of
principles which direct us towards human fulfillment
so far as that happier state of affairs is both constituted and
achievable by way of the actions that both manifest and build up the
excellences of character traditionally called virtues. If one
must use a post-Kantian jargon, it is both “teleological”
and “deontic”, and not more the one than the other.

Aquinas' moral and political philosophy has to be reconstructed from
his theological treatises and commentaries and his commentaries on
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and the first two and half
books of Aristotle's Politics. Its proper interpretation has
been a matter of some difficulty from the time of his death in
1274. In recent decades the way to understand some aspects of its
foundational concepts and logic has been strenuously disputed, not
least among those philosophers who see it as offering a broadly sound
answer to radical scepticism about value and obligation, an answer
truer and more human than Kant's or Bentham's or their (in the
broadest sense) successors'. A partial sample of these controversies
is given in 1.1 and 1.2 below, which state the more common
interpretation on two strategic issues and then elaborate objections
to those interpretations. The remainder of this article then proceeds
on the basis that there is merit in these objections, and that the
study of Aquinas' ethics as a systematic and strictly philosophical
work of practical reason (at its most general and reflective) is still
in its infancy. Further textual support, from over 60 of Aquinas'
works, can be found in Finnis 1998. Criticisms of the interpretation
of Aquinas' theory that is proposed in that work can be found in Long
2004, and earlier in Lisska 1998 and McInerny 1997. These works argue
in various ways that that interpretation denies or neglects the
metaphysical foundations of the principles of practical reason that it
offers to identify. The first issue underlying this debate is whether
the order of inquiry and coming to know (the epistemological order) is
the same as the order of metaphysical dependence. The second issue is
whether we can settle the first issue by using the epistemological
axiom that we come to an (ultimately metaphysical) understanding of
dynamic natures by understanding capacities through their actuations
— which, in turn, we come to understand by understanding their
objects. Does or does not that axiom entail that understanding of
objects such as the intelligible goods (the objects of acts of will)
precedes an adequate knowledge of nature, notwithstanding that (as is
agreed on all sides) in the metaphysical order of intrinsic dependence
such objects could not be willed or attained but for the given nature
of (in this case) the human person?

One line of understanding is exemplified by the section on
“moral doctrine” in McInerny and O'Callaghan 2005. It
gives a priority to Aristotle's arguments attempting to identify
a “distinctive” or “peculiarly human”
function,” arguments which proceed on the postulate that, if each
kind of craft has its own characteristic function and mode of
operation, so must human life as a whole have an “overall”
and “distinctively characteristic” function and
operatio; and the determination of this should decisively
shape the whole of (the rest of) ethics and political theory. To this
standard interpretation other interpreters, such as Grisez, Finnis, and
Rhonheimer, object on grounds such as these:

(i) Aquinas' austerely self-disciplined purposes as an
Aristotelian commentator make quite insecure any assumption
that he treats as fundamental to his own thinking any and every
proposition which is treated by Aristotle as fundamental and expounded
in Aquinas' relevant commentary without adverse comment.

(ii) The “distinctive function” argument is not
prominent or adduced as fundamental (or at all) in Aquinas' more
free-standing treatments of morality.

(iii) The argument is treated by Aquinas' commentary as
yielding the conclusion that felicitas (human happiness or
flourishing) consists in a complete life lived in accordance with
reason and hence, by entailment, with virtue. But in the Summa
Theologiae this is argued to be only an imperfect and incomplete
felicitas, and the problematic character of such a concept is
apparent from the Summa's definition of
felicitas (and synonymously beatitudo) as perfect
good and complete satisfaction of all desires.

(iv) The “distinctive function” argument is inherently
unsatisfying in ways that could hardly have failed to be apparent to so
able a philosopher as Aquinas. (a) In Aquinas' rendering, it
depends on the postulate that “nature does nothing in
vain”, which in turn depends, according to Aquinas, on the
premise that nature is the product of divine creative rationality, a
premise which Aquinas himself argues is, though provable, by no means
self-evident. (b) It seems arbitrary to assume that, if there is an
appropriate function or operatio of human beings, it must be
peculiar to them. For peculiarity or distinctiveness has no inherent
relationship to practical fittingness, and in fact Aquinas elsewhere
denies that rationality is peculiar to human beings since he holds that
there are other intelligent creatures (the angels, understood to be
created minds unmixed with matter, occupying what would otherwise be a
surprising gap in the hierarchy of beings which ascends from the most
material and inactive kinds through the vegetative kinds, the animal
kinds, and the rational animal humankind, to the one utterly active and
intelligent, non-dependent and uncreated divine being).

(v) The root of the weakness of the “peculiar/distinctive
function” argument is that it is looking in the wrong direction,
towards a metaphysical proposition concerning the nature of things,
instead of towards what is intelligibly good as an opportunity, perhaps
even the supreme opportunity, for me and anyone like me (any human
being). And it is a truly fundamental methodological axiom of
Aquinas's philosophy, from beginning to end of his works, that in
coming to understand the nature of a dynamic reality such as human
being, one must first understand its capacities, to understand which
one must first understand its act(ivities), to understand which one
must first come to understand those activities' objects. But the
objects of human activities are intelligible opportunities such as
coming to know, being alive and healthy, being in friendship with
others, and so forth – objects whose attractiveness, fittingness,
opportuneness, or appropriateness is in no way dependent upon, or even
much enhanced by, the thought that they are distinctively
characteristic of human beings as opposed to other animals.

(vi) The fact that an operatio is distinctive of human
beings does not entail that that operatio is truly valuable,
still less that it is obligatory, or that it is more valuable than
alternative and incompatible ways or objectives of acting. For a
premise containing no evaluative or normative term cannot entail a
conclusion including such a term. If, on the other hand, the postulate
that a certain operatio is the proper (or even a proper)
function of human beings is asserted to be itself evaluative and/or
normative rather than, or as well as, factual/descriptive, then some
account is needed of the postulate's source or justification (or
self-evidence?). Aquinas has a fairly careful account of the
self-evidence of a number of foundational evaluative and normative
principles, but only one or two of them are said by him to point to
kinds of operatio distinctive of human beings; two of the
foundational principles are explicitly said by him to direct to goods
that are not peculiar to human beings.

(vii) The analogy comparing one's life as a whole to arts and
crafts, each with its own distinctive function, operatio,
seems weak, questionable and indeed question-begging. For life as a
whole is open-ended both in having no knowable duration (see 2.2.
below) and in requiring judgment about the choice-worthiness of ends as
well as means and techniques (see 4.4.1. below). Moreover, Aquinas like
Aristotle regularly insists on the irreducibility of the distinction or
distinctions between, on the one hand, ars or factio
(arts, crafts, techniques) and actio (the precise
subject-matter of morality and morally significant choices).

Along with very many other Thomistic commentators, McInerny and
O'Callaghan 2005 and Celano 2003 treat Aquinas' moral
philosophy as founded, like his moral theology, upon his determination
of what felicitas (= perfecta beatitudo and
Aristotle's eudaimonia) truly is, a determination made
in the opening quaestiones of the Second Part of his Summa
Theologiae, where he elaborately argues that complete
beatitudo or felicitas consists in an uninterruptible
vision of God (and, in God, of the other truths we naturally desire to
know), something possible for us only in a life — in many
respects another life — after death. But it is
possible to regard Aquinas' argument in those
quaestiones as dictated by the needs of a specifically
theological pedagogy, as open to telling objections, and as detachable
from (or at least as methodologically posterior to) the working and
sound foundations of his moral philosophy and his treatment of specific
moral issues – detachable, that is to say, in a way that Aquinas
would not need to regard as inappropriate in the different context of
today's discourse. This article will treat Aquinas' ethics
and political theory as detachable from his theology of life's
ultimate point, and will take seriously his emphatic and reiterated
thesis that, apart from the divinely given and super-natural
opportunity of perfecta beatitudo (a gift about which
philosophy as such knows nothing), the only ultimate end and
beatitudo (fulfillment) for human beings is living in
a completely reasonable, morally excellent (virtuosus) way.
That thesis entails that philosophy's main account of
morality need and should contain no claim about what perfect happiness
consists in.

Despite surface appearances, Aquinas is conscious of
Aristotle's failure to settle whether it is contemplation or
political praxis that is the essence of human fulfillment. He
therefore attempts, more intently than Aristotle did in any surviving
work, to identify what the first principles of ethics and politics are,
and to do so without any premises or presuppositions about a unitary
“last end of human existence”.

Moreover, when Aquinas does refer to beatitudo as
fundamental to identifying the principles of practical reason and the
natural (because reasonable) moral law, he in the same breath
emphasizes that this is not to be thought of as the happiness of the
deliberating and acting individual alone, but rather as the
common flourishing of the community, ultimately the whole
community of humankind:

The ultimate end of human life is felicitas or
beatitudo… So the main concern of law [including the
natural (moral) law] must be with directing towards beatitudo.
Again, since every part stands to the whole as incomplete stands to
complete, and individual human beings are each parts of a complete
community, law's appropriate concern is necessarily with
directing towards common felicitas … that is, to
common good. (ST I-II q. 90 a. 2.)

The “complete community” mentioned here is the political
community, with its laws, but the proposition implicitly refers also to
the community of all rational creatures, to whose common good morality
(the moral law) directs us.

Detaching Aquinas' philosophy from his theology is compatible
with distinctions he firmly delineates at the beginning of his two
mature theological syntheses, the Summa contra Gentiles and
the Summa Theologiae. (i) There are truths, he says, which are
accessible to natural reason, that is, to ordinary experience
(including the specialized observations of natural scientists),
insight, and reflection; and these include practical truths about good
and evil, right and wrong. (ii) Many of those truths of natural reason
are confirmed, and even clarified, by divine revelation, that is, the
propositions communicated directly or inferentially in the life and
works of Christ, as transmitted by his immediate followers and prepared
for in the Jewish scriptures accepted by those followers as revelatory.
(iii) Some of the truths divinely revealed could not have been
discovered by natural, philosophical reason, even though, once
accepted, their content and significance can be illuminated by the
philosophically ordered reflection which he calls theology.

The philosophical positions in ethics and politics (including law)
that are explored in this article belong to categories (i) and (ii).
The moral and political norms stated, for example, in the biblical
Decalogue are, in Aquinas' view, all knowable independently of
that revelation, which confirms and perhaps clarifies them. But the
propositions that he holds about what the true last end or ultimate
destiny of human beings actually is belong to category (iii) and cannot
be affirmed on any philosophical basis, even though philosophy, he
thinks, can demonstrate that they are neither incoherent nor contrary
to any proposition which philosophy shows must be affirmed.

Intelligence and reason are not two powers; “reason” and
“reasoning” in a narrow sense can be regarded as the
extension of one's “intelligence” (one's
capacity for intelligent insight into the data of experience) into the
propositional work of reasoning towards judgment, and
“reason” (ratio) in a broader sense refers to
this whole capacity, only analytically divisible into aspects or
phases. So too, practical reason is not a distinct power. Rather,
one's capacity to think about the way things are can be
(and naturally, that is effortlessly and normally, is)
“extended” (Aquinas' metaphor) to thinking
intelligently and making reasonable and true judgments about what
to do. Thinking and judging of the latter kind is practical, that
is, intends to terminate in choice and action (in Greek
praxis, in Latin actio). “Practical
reason” sometimes refers (i) directly to such thinking,
sometimes (ii) to the propositional content or structure which such
thinking has when it is done well – and thus to the propositions
that pick out what kinds of action one ought to be judging
pursuit-worthy, undesirable, right, wrong, etc. – and sometimes
(iii) to the capacity to engage in such thinking by understanding such propositions and
being guided by them.

Practical reason's central activity is deliberation about what
to do. One would have no need to deliberate unless one were confronted
by alternative attractive possibilities for action (kinds of
opportunity) between which one must choose (in the sense that one
cannot do both at the same time, if at all) and can choose. The
standards that one comes to understand to be the appropriate guides for
one's deliberation, choice and action give such guidance, not by
predicting what one will do, but by directing what one should
do. (The “should” here may but need not be moral.) There
could be no normativity, no practical (choice-guiding) directiveness,
unless free choices were really possible.

Aquinas's position is not that all our activities are freely
chosen: there are indeed “acts of the human person”,
perhaps quite frequent, which are not “human acts” in the
central sense (freely chosen) but rather spontaneous and undeliberated.
Nor is it that chosen acts must be immediately preceded by choice: many
of one's acts are the carrying out of choices which were made in
the past and need not be now renewed or repeated since no alternative
option appears attractive. It is that one can be and often is in such a
position that, confronted by two or more attractive possibilities
(including perhaps the option of “doing nothing”), there is
nothing either within or outside one's personal constitution that
determines (settles) one's choice, other than the choosing:
Mal. q. 6. This conception of free choice (liberum
arbitrium or libera electio) is much stronger than
Aristotle's, on whose conception free choices are free only from
external determining factors. Aquinas' conception of
free choice is also incompatible with modern notions of soft
determinism, or the supposed compatibility of human responsibility (and
of the sense [self-understanding] that one is freely choosing)
with determination of every event by laws (e.g. physical) of nature.
Aquinas understands the freedom of our free choices to be a reality as
primary and metaphysically and conceptually irreducible as the reality
of physical laws, and he puts all his reflections on morality and
practical reason under the heading of “mastery over one's
own acts” (ST I-II, prologue).

He is also insistent that if there were no such freedom and
self-determination, there could be no responsibility (fault, merit,
etc.), and no sense or content to any ought (normativity)
such as ethics is concerned with.

Aquinas pulls together into a powerful (though confusingly
expounded) synthesis a long tradition of analysis of the elements of
understanding (reason) and intelligent response (will) that constitute
deliberation, choice, and execution of choice: ST I-II qq.
6–17. The analysis shows the centrality of intention in the assessment
of options and actions. In a narrow sense of the word,
intention is always of ends and choice is of means;
but since every means (save the means most proximate to sheer trying or
exertion) is also an end relative to a more proximate means, what is
chosen when one adopts one of two or more proposals (for one's
action) that one has shaped in one's deliberation is rightly,
though more broadly, said to be what one intends, what one does
intentionally or with intent(ion), and so forth. An act(ion) is
paradigmatically what it is intended to be; that is, its morally
primary description – prior to any moral evaluation or predicate
— is the description it had in the deliberation by which one shaped
the proposal to act thus. Aquinas' way of saying this
is: acts are specified by — have their specific character
from — their objects, where “objects” has the focal
meaning of proximate end as envisaged by the deliberating and acting
person. Of course, the behavior involved in that act can be given other
descriptions in the light of conventions of description, or
expectations and responsibilities, and so forth, and one or other these
descriptions may be given priority by law, custom, or some other
special interest or perspective. But it is primarily on acts
qua intended, or on the acts (e.g. of taking care) that one
ought to have intended, that ethical standards (moral principles and
precepts) bear. To repeat: in the preceding sentence
“intended” is used in the broad sense; Aquinas sometimes
employs it this way (e.g. ST II-II q. 64 a. 7), though in his
official synthesis the word is used in the narrower sense to signify
the (further) intention with which the act's object was
chosen – object being the most proximate of one's (broad
sense) intentions.

This understanding of human action has often been misappropriated by
interpreters who have assumed that when Aquinas says that acts are
wrongful by reason of their “undue matter” (indebita
materia), he refers to an item of behavior specifiable by its
physical characteristics and causal structure. So, for example,
direct killingof the innocent is taken to refer to
behavior whose causally immediate effect is killing, or which has its
lethal effect before it has its intended good effect. But this is
incompatible with Aquinas' fundamental and consistent positions
about human action. The “matter” of a morally significant
act is, for him, its immediate object under the description it has in
one's deliberation: Mal. q. 7 a. 1; q. 2 a. 4 ad 5; a.
6; a. 7 ad 8. It is, in other words, not an item of behavior considered in its observable physicality as such, but rather one's
behavior as one's objective (or the most proximate of one's
objectives), that is, as one envisages it, adopts it by choice, and
causes it by one's effort to do so. The most objective account of
human action is provided by the account that is most subjective. This
sound account will, however, set aside any distorted act-descriptions
that one may offer others, or even oneself, as rationalizations and
exculpations of one's choice and act, but that do not correspond
to what really made the option attractive, as end or as means, and so
was treated, in one's actual course of deliberation, as
one's reason for acting as one did. The immediately and foreseen
lethal effect of an act of self-defense may genuinely be a side-effect
of one's choosing to stop the attack by the only available
efficacious means (ST II-II q. 64 a. 7), or it may be
one's precise object (and the “matter” of one's
choice and act) because one's (further) intent was to take lethal
revenge on an old enemy, or to deter potential assailants by the
prospect of their death, or to win a reward. Behaviorally identical
items of behavior may thus be very different human acts, discernible
only by knowing the acting person's reasons for acting.

Ethical standards, for which practical reason's first
principles provide the foundations or sources, concern actions as
choosable and self-determining. They are thus to be distinguished
clearly, as Aristotle already emphasized, from standards which are
practical, rational, and normative in a different way, namely the
technical or technological standards internal to every art, craft, or
other system for mastering matter. Aquinas locates the significant and
irreducible difference between ethics and all these forms of
“art” in three features: (i) Moral thought, even when most
unselfishly concerned with helping others through the good effects of
physical effort and causality, is fundamentally concerned with the
problem of bringing order into one's own will, action, and
character, rather than the problem of how to bring order into the world
beyond one's will. (ii) Correspondingly, the effects of morally
significant free choices (good or evil) are in the first instance
intransitive (effects on the will and character of the acting person.
Only secondarily are they transitive effects on the world, even when
that person's intentions are focused, as they normally should be,
on the benefits of those external effects. (iii) Whereas every art and
technique has a more or less limited objective (end) which can be
accomplished by skillful deployment of the art, moral thought has in
view an unlimited and common (shared) horizon or point, that of
“human life as a whole [finis communis totius humanae
vitae]” (ST I-II q. 21 a. 2 ad 2), for each of
one's morally significant choices (for good or evil) is a choice
to devote a part of one's single life to a purpose which could
have been any of the whole open-ended range of purposes open to human
pursuit for the sake of benefiting all or any human being(s).

Practical reason, in Aquinas' view, has both one absolutely
first principle and many truly first principles: ST I-II q. 94
a. 2. The absolutely first principle is formal and in a sense
contentless. Like the logical principle of non-contradiction which
controls all rational thought, it expresses, one might say, the
pressure of reason and is so far from being empty of significance and
force that its form may be regarded as the frame, and its normativity
the source, for all the normativity of the substantive first principles
and of the moral principles which are inferable from them. Aquinas
articulates it as “Good is to be done and pursued, and bad
avoided” (ibid.).

This has often been truncated to (i) “Good is to be done, and
evil avoided” or even, more drastically, (iia) “Do good and
avoid evil” or yet more drastically (iib) “Avoid evil and
seek the good”. But Grisez 1963 gave reason to think these
abbreviations both exegetically and philosophically unsound. The first
practical principle is not a command or imperative as (ii) would have
it, nor is it a moral principle as all these formulae suggest by
omitting “to be pursued” (see 2.7 below). Both in grammar
and in propositional content, the principle's gerundive
“is-to-be” is neither imperative nor predictive, but
rationally directive — an ought — in the way that gets
its fully developed and central sense and normativity in the more
specified ought of moral standards.

Against a Kantian or neo-Kantian primacy or ultimacy of
“structures of mind”, Aquinas would say that just as the
pressure of reason articulated in the principle of non-contradiction
has its source in the structure of reality — in the real
opposition between being and not being — so the
source of the equivalently first practical principle is the real
desirability of intelligible goods, and the true
undesirability of what is not good.

If Plato and Aristotle fail to articulate substantive first
principles of practical reason, and if Kant overlooks them in favor of
the quasi-Humeian notions of motivation that dominate ethics during the
Enlightenment (and ever since), the articulation of such principles by
Aquinas deserves attention.

Each of the several substantive first principles of practical reason
picks out and directs one towards a distinct intelligible good which,
in line with the primariness of the principle identifying it, can be
called “basic” (not a term used by Aquinas). Aquinas
regards each of the first practical principles as self-evident (per
se notum: known through itself) and undeduced (primum and
indemonstrabile). He does not, however, mean that they are
data-less “intuitions”; even the indemonstrable first
principles in any field of human knowledge are knowable only by insight
(intellectus) into data of experience (here, of causality and
inclination).

Moreover, when describing the first practical principles as
self-evident, Aquinas emphasises that self-evidence is relative: what
is not obvious to some will be self-evident to those who have more
ample experience and a better understanding of other aspects of the
matter. And we should expect our understanding of first principles to
grow as we come to understand more about the objects to which they
refer and direct (e.g. knowledge, human life, marriage, etc.).

Aquinas's repeated affirmation that practical reason's
first principles are undeduced refutes the common accusation or
assumption that his ethics invalidly attempts to deduce or infer
ought from is, for his affirmation entails that the
sources of all relevant oughts cannot be deduced from any
is. There remain, however, a number of contemporary Thomists
who deny that such a deduction or inference need be fallacious, and
regard Aquinas as postulating some such deduction or inference. They
are challenged., however, by others (such as Rhonheimer, Boyle, and
Finnis) who, while sharing the view that his ethics is in these
respects fundamentally sound, deny that Aquinas attempted or postulated
any such deduction or inference, and ask for some demonstration (i)
that he did and (ii) that he or anyone else could make such a deduction
or inference.

These critics reinforce their denial by pointing out that in his
prologue to his commentary on Aristotle's Ethics,
Aquinas teaches that knowledge of things that are what they are
independently of our thought (i.e. of nature) is fundamentally distinct
both from logic and from practical knowledge, one of whose two species
is philosophia moralis (whose first principles or fundamental
oughts are under discussion here)

Aquinas neglects to spell out how these first principles come to be
understood. But he holds that they are understood and accepted by
everyone who has enough experience to understand their terms. The
process of coming to understand a first practical principle may be
exemplified as follows, in relation to the basic good of knowledge. As
a child one experiences the inclination to ask questions, and to greet
apparently satisfactory answers with satisfaction and failure to answer
as a disappointment. At some point one comes to understand — has the
insight — that such answers are instances of a quite general standing
possibility, namely knowledge, coming to know and overcoming ignorance.
By a distinct though often well nigh simultaneous further insight one
comes to understand that this — knowledge — is not merely a
possibility but also a good [bonum], that is to say
an opportunity, a benefit, something desirable as a
kind of improvement (a perfectio) of one's or
anyone's condition, and as to be pursued.

The basic human goods which first practical principles identify and
direct us to are identified by Aquinas as (i) life, (ii)
“marriage between man and woman and bringing up of children
[coniunctio maris et feminae et educatio liberorum]”
(not at all reducible to “procreation”), (iii) knowledge,
(iv) living in fellowship (societas and amicitia)
with others, (v) practical reasonableness (bonum rationis)
itself, and (vi) knowing and relating appropriately to the
transcendent cause of all being, value, normativity and efficacious
action (ST I-II q. 94 aa. 2 & 3). His lists are always
explicitly open-ended. They sketch the outlines and elements of the
flourishing of the human persons in whom they can be actualized. Even
complete fulfillment – the beatitudo perfecta that
Aquinas places firmly outside our natural capacities and this mortal
life – could not be regarded as a further good, but rather as a
synthesis and heightened actualization of these basic goods in the
manner appropriate to a form of life free from both immaturity (and
other incidents of procreation) and decay.

Similarly, as is entailed by the epistemological principle that
nature is known by capacities, capacities by acts, and acts by their
objects (see 1.1(v) above), these basic goods, being the basic objects
of will and free action, are the outline of human nature. The
is of an adequate account of human nature is dependent upon
prior grasp of the oughts of practical reason's first,
good-identifying principles, even though that prior grasp was made
possible by that partial understanding of human nature which comes with
an understanding of certain lines of causality and possibility. But
defending the epistemological priority of the intelligible objects of
will in explanations of practical reason does not entail (contrast McInerny
1992) any denial of the metaphysical priority of the naturally given
facts about the human makeup.

Many modern accounts of Aquinas' theory of natural law give
explanatory primacy to the naturalness of the inclinations (to live, to
know, etc.) that correspond to these basic goods. But others regard
this as a fundamental misunderstanding of Aquinas' conception of
will, and of the epistemological relationship between nature and
reason. Will is for him intelligent response to intelligible good:
one's will is “in” one's reason [voluntas
in ratione]. He makes it very explicit both that human actions are
rightly said to be natural (in the morally relevant sense of
“natural”) when and because they are intelligent and
reasonable (ST I-II q. 71 a. 2), and that there are
inclinations which are natural, in the sense that they are commonly
found or characterize some or even most individuals, yet are unnatural
because lacking any intelligibly good object. So explanatory priority
must be accorded to the basic human goods themselves, and to the
self-evident desirability which makes each of them the object of an
inclination in the will of anyone sufficiently intelligent and mature
to understand their goodness (that is, the way they make human beings
more fulfilled, more “perfect” [complete]). An inclination
of that kind is relevant in practical reason because its object is
desirable, and desirable because it would contribute to anyone's
flourishing. To say this is not to say that our natural inclinations to
what contributes to our flourishing are mere accident or happenstance.

Many nineteenth- and early twentieth century accounts of Aquinas
took it that the first principles of practical reason, which he
regularly calls first principles of natural law or natural right, are
moral principles picking out kinds of human act as to be done (e.g.
alms-giving to the poor) or not done (e.g. murder, adultery), in the
manner of the Commandments. But though there are a few passages in
which Aquinas himself speaks in that way, they can be read down so as
to make them consistent with the more strategic passages in which he
speaks of such moral principles or norms as “derived”
conclusions from first principles. (See also 3.3 below.) Even immoral
people so blinded by culture or disposition that they do not make these
inferences nevertheless can and normally do understand the
first principles of practical reason and are guided by them,
though imperfectly, in their deliberations.

Against Kant's assumption that, since the ends toward which
one wishes to act are subjective because projected (as Hume proposed) by
one's subrational desires, practical reason's function is
to limit and channel one's pursuit of those ends, Aquinas
considers that practical reason's first and fundamental operation
is not limiting, confining or negative but rather facilitating and
positive: finding and constructing intelligible ends to be pursued
(prosequenda), ends that give intelligent point to our
behavior.

The thesis that the first practical principles are only incipiently
moral should not be confused with the widespread modern opinion that
practical reason's default position is self-interest or
“prudential” reason, so that there is a puzzle about how
one transits from this to morality. In Aquinas' classical view,
one's reason (as distinct from some of one's customary ways of thinking)
naturally understands the primary or basic goods as good for anyone,
and further understands that it is good to participate in the many
forms of friendship which require that one set aside all merely
emotionally motivated self-preference.

The discerning, inferring and elaborating of moral principles is a
task for practical reasonableness. The judgments one makes in doing
this are together called one's conscience, in a sense
prior to the sense in which conscience is the judgments one passes or
could pass on one's own acts considered retrospectively. Someone
whose conscience is sound has in place the basic elements of sound
judgment and practical reasonableness, that is of the intellectual and
moral virtue which Aquinas calls prudentia. Full
prudentia requires that one put one's sound judgment
into effect all the way down, i.e. into the particulars of choice and
action in the face of temptations to unreasonable but perhaps not
unintelligent alternatives.

Conscience in Aquinas' view is not a special power or presence
within us, but is our practical intelligence at work, primarily in the
form of a stock of judgments about the reasonableness (rightness) or
unreasonableness (wrongness) of kinds of action (kinds of option).
Since each such judgment is of the form “[It is true that] action
of the kind phi is always [or generally] wrong [or: is
generally to be done, etc.]” or “phi is [always]
[or: generally] required [or forbidden] by reason”, it must be
the case – as Aquinas stresses very forcefully – that
one's conscience is binding upon oneself even when it is utterly
mistaken and directs or licenses awful misdeeds. For since it is
logically impossible that one could be aware that one's present
judgment of conscience is mistaken, setting oneself against one's
own firm judgment of conscience is setting oneself against the goods of
truth and reasonableness, and that cannot fail to be wrong: ST
I-II q. 19 a. 5; Ver. q. 17 a. 4. The fact that, if one has
formed one's judgment corruptly, one will also be acting wrongly
if one follows it (ST I-II q. 19 a. 6) does not affect the
obligatoriness (for oneself) of one's conscience. This teaching
about conscience was rather novel in his day and to this day is often
misrepresented or misapplied as a kind of relativism or subjectivism.
But it is actually an implication of Aquinas' clarity about the
implications of regarding moral judgments as true (or false)
and of thus rejecting subjectivism and relativism.

Aquinas is regrettably inexplicit about how the first practical
principles yield moral principles, precepts or rules that have the
combined generality and specificity of the precepts found in the
portion of the biblical Decalogue (Exod. 20.1–17;
Deut. 5.6–21) traditionally called moral (the last seven
precepts, e.g. parents should be reverenced, murder is wrong, adultery
is wrong, etc.). But a reconstruction of his scattered statements makes
it clear enough that in his view a first implication of the array of
first principles, each directing us to goods actualisable as much in
others as in oneself, is this: that one should love one's
neighbor as oneself.

Since he considers this principle, like the set of first principles
mentioned in I-II q. 94 a. 2, to be self-evident (per se
notum), he must regard the principle of love-of-neighbor-as-self
not so much as an inference from, or even specification of, but rather
a redescriptive summary of that set. This in turn suggests the further
reflection that the first principles, and the goods (bona) to
which they direct us, are transparent, so to speak, for the
flesh-and-blood persons in whom they are and can be instantiated.
Moreover, it may be thought that the primary moral principle of love of
neighbor as oneself is another reason to doubt (despite appearances)
the strategic role of eudemonism in his ethics. Aristotelianising
interpretations of Aquinas' ethics normally make central the
notion of fulfillment, understood (it seems) as the fulfillment of the
deliberating and acting person – to which the requirement of
neighbor love does not have a perspicuous relationship. Grisez and
others, on the other hand, take it that the role of fulfillment
(eudaimonia, beatitudo) in ethical thought's unfolding
from the first principles of practical reason is best captured by a
“master moral principle” close though perhaps not identical
to Aquinas's supreme moral principle: that all one's acts
of will be open to integral human fulfillment, that is to the
fulfillment of all human persons and communities now and in future.

The supreme moral principle of love of neighbor as self has, Aquinas
thinks, an immediately proximate specification in the Golden Rule:
Others are to be treated by me as I would wish them to treat me. The
tight relation between the love principle and the Golden Rule suggests
that love and justice, though analytically distinguishable, certainly
cannot be contrasted as other and other. “Neighbor”
excludes no human being anywhere, insofar as anyone could be benefited
by one's choices and actions. To love someone is essentially to
will that person's good. The reasonable priorities among all
these persons as objects of one's love, goodwill and care are
discussed by Aquinas both as an “order of love(s)”
[ordo amoris] and as a matter of right and justice.

Since Aquinas thinks that the existence and providence of God, as
the transcendent source of all persons and benefits, is certain, his
usual statement of the master moral principle affirms that one should
love God and one's-neighbor-as-oneself. But since he accepts that
the existence of God is not self-evident, he can allow that the more
strictly self-evident form of the master moral principle refers only to
love of human persons (self and neighbors). He would add that, once the
existence and nature of God is accepted, as it philosophically should
be, the rational requirement of loving God, and thus the fuller version
of the master moral principle, is self-evident. He also holds that one
does not offend against this requirement of loving God except by making
choices contrary to human good, that is, to love of self or neighbor:
ScG III c. 122 n. 2.

All moral principles and norms, Aquinas thinks, can be inferred —
as either implicit in, or “referable to” as conclusions
from — the moral first principle of love of neighbor as self:
ST I-II q. 99 a. 1 ad 2 with q. 91 a. 4c and q. 100 a. 2 ad 2;
q. 100 aa. 3 and 11c. But he never displays an example or schema of
these deduction-like inferences. Consequently, as noted in 2.7 above,
his would-be successors have sometimes proposed that moral principles
and norms have the self-evidence of first principles, and sometimes,
equally desperately, have offered premises which, though suggested by
some of Aquinas's argumentation or remarks, are incoherent with
his general theory – e.g. that natural functions are not to be
frustrated.

The main lines of Aquinas' theory of moral principles strongly
suggest that moral norms (precepts, standards) are specifications of
“Good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided”,
specifications which so direct choice and action that each of the
primary goods (elements of human fulfillment) will be respected and
promoted to the extent required by the good of practical reasonableness
(bonum rationis). And what practical reasonableness requires
seems to be that each of the basic human goods be treated as what it
truly is: a basic reason for action amongst other basic reasons whose
integral directiveness is not to be cut down or deflected by
subrational passions. The principle of love of neighbor as self and the
Golden Rule immediately pick out one element in that integral
directiveness. The other framework moral rules give moral direction by
stating ways in which more or less specific types of choice
are immediately or mediately contrary to some basic good. This appears
to be Aquinas's implicit method, as illustrated below (3.4).

An adequate exposition and defence of the moral norms upheld by
Aquinas requires a critique, only hints for which can be found in his
work, of theories which claim that choice can and should rationally be
guided by a utilitarian, consequentialist or proportionalist master
principle calling for maximizing of overall net good (or, some say,
incompatibly, for minimizing net evils). In developments of
Aquinas's moral theory such as are proposed by Grisez and Finnis,
that critique is treated as an indispensable preliminary to any
reflective non-question-begging identification of the route from first
principles to specific moral norms.

The three examples or sets of examples considered in this section
are only examples of the kinds of moral norms (praecepta)
which Aquinas considers are excluded by any sound conscience from
one's deliberations about what to choose. Other examples are more
complex, such as theft and various other wrongful deprivations of
property, and the form of charging for loans which is named usury and
judged by Aquinas (not implausibly, though with little direct
applicability to developed financial markets: see Finnis 1998, 204–210)
to be always contrary to just equality. Aquinas also treats in some
detail scores, indeed hundreds of other moral issues, touching the life
of judges, advocates, merchants, the rich, the poor, or everyone.

Some types of act are intrinsically and immediately contrary to the
basic human good of life, that is to a human being's very being.
Every act which is intended, whether as end or as means, to kill an
innocent human being, and every act done by a private person which is
intended to kill any human being, is to be excluded from
deliberation as wrongful because contrary to love of neighbor as self
(or self as neighbor). Public persons, Aquinas thinks, can rightfully
intend to kill in carrying out needful acts of war, suppression of
serious wrongdoing, and punishment (see also 6.3 below).

As a private person one may rightfully use force in defense of
oneself or others even if the force is such that one foresees it is
likely or even certain to kill; but one's intention in using such
lethal force must not be to kill, but only to disable and block the
attack (and less lethal force would not have met the need for defensive
blocking of the assault). Aquinas' discussion of this
(ST II-II q. 64 a.7) is the locus classicus for what later
became known, unhappily, as the “principle” of double
effect, whose real core is the thought that moral principles bear
differently on kinds of action specified by intention (e.g. to
kill) from the way they bear on behavior chosen with foresight
that it will (probably or even certainly) kill as a
side-effect (praeter intentionem – outside the
acting person's intention).

Aquinas wavers between suggesting that the use of lethal public
force, e.g. in capital punishment, intends (“is referred
to”) justice rather than killing, and plainly accepting that in
such cases death is indeed intended. The latter is his dominant
position; his arguments to justify a kind of choice which, whatever its
beneficial consequences, is so immediately against the good of life
have come increasingly to seem insufficient: the Catechism of the
Catholic Church (1993), paras. 2263–67 expounds its whole teaching
on war, lethal police action, and capital punishment on the basis of
the thought that these can be justified only so far as they amount to
causing death as a side-effect, and not as killing with intent to kill.
The thought is formulated by appeal to Aquinas' reference to acts
with “double effect” in his discussion of private
defence in ST II-II q. 64 a. 7.

Marriage is, Aquinas says, a primary human good and, philosophically
considered, it has a dual point (end, finis): (i) the
procreation and bringing up of children is a manner suited to their
good, and (ii) fides, which goes far beyond the literal
translation “faithfulness” and includes not only
exclusivity and permanence but also the positive readiness and
commitment to being united with one's spouse in mind, body and a
mutually assisting domestic life. Aquinas neither subordinates one of
these two “ends” to the other, nor regards it as
appropriate to choose to divide them. Fides is a good and
sufficient reason for engaging in the usus matrimonii, the
kind of sexual act that is intended to enable both husband and wife to
experience and in a particular way actualize and express the good of their
marriage, so that the act's giving and receiving of delight is token of their
commitment.

Consequently the kind of wrongful sexual choice most often considered
by Aquinas is engaging in intercourse with one's spouse without
fides, because one either (i) is thinking of one's
spouse in the way one would think of a prostitute, or (significantly
worse) (ii) would be willing to have sex with somebody else if some
other attractive person were to be available. Such depersonalized sex
acts are instances of willing against the good of marriage (contra
bonum matrimonii). This reiterated analysis should be regarded as
the key to Aquinas' sex ethics. Another paradigmatic kind of instance,
in itself much more serious, is a married person's choice to
have intercourse with some third party (perhaps with the other
spouse's consent). All other wrongful kinds of sex act have
their wrongfulness, according to Aquinas, not because they are
unnatural in some biological or sociological sense of
“unnatural”, but because they are against reason's
directive to respect, if not also pursue, the good of marriage, a
respect that calls for reserving to marriage and truly marital
intercourse all uses of one's capacity to engage in the
intentional pursuit of sexual satisfaction. For unless one regards
such reservation as required, one's stance about human sex acts
is contra bonum matrimonii and unreasonable because one
cannot coherently maintain that the intercourse of the married enables
them to actualize and experience their fides and their
marriage, a thought essential to the flourishing (bonum)
of marriage and thus of children and thus of the wider community as a
whole. One measure of the gravity of morally bad sex acts is
applicable to some kinds but not others: injustice (as in rape or
seduction of the vulnerable). Another measure, applicable to all such
acts, is the extent of the deviance (“distance”) between
acts of that kind and truly marital acts.

As in ours, many in Aquinas' milieu found it difficult to
understand how mutually agreeable sex could be a serious moral issue,
or indeed a moral issue at all. Aquinas noted this, but was clear that
every kind of conduct that acts out and thus confirms and reinforces a
disposition of will contra bonum matrimonii is seriously wrong
because so many aspects of individual and social flourishing profoundly
depend upon the health of the institution of marriage, as it exists in
the real lives of adults and children. It is worth repeating, since the
point is so often misunderstood and misreported, that Aquinas'
moral arguments for distinguishing good from bad sex never run
from “natural” to “therefore
good/reasonable/right”, but always from
“good/reasonable/right” to therefore “natural”
(and similarly, of course, for unreasonable and unnatural): see II-II
q. 153 a. 2c, a. 3c, q. 154 a. 1c, a. 2 ad 2, a. 11.

Aquinas' thesis is that lying, properly defined, is always to be
excluded as to some extent wrong. The thesis is often misunderstood as being
premised on the thought that lying is contrary to the natural function of
tongue or speech, a thought that has often been transposed into an
effort to explain his theses about the wrong kinds of sex act. But, as
has been seen, his sex ethics has another and more plausible basis,
and so, it seems (albeit less clearly), has his ethics of
lying. Though all his treatments include something like “words
are naturally signs of what one understand” (ST II-II q. 110
a. 3) or “speech was invented for expressing the conceptions in
one's heart” (Sent. III d. 38 a. 3c), this
statement is pointing to a more explanatory and prior premise,
discernible though never adequately articulated so as to show its
relation to basic human goods. This prior premise turns on his
definition of lying as one's assertion of what one
believes to be false. Whenever one asserts, one affirms as true two
propositions: explicitly the proposition one articulates as true
despite one's belief that it is not, and implicitly the
proposition that one believes what one is assertively articulating. So
Aquinas seems to locate the essential wrongfulness of lying in this intentional
dissonance between the self presented or reported and
one's real self: a duplicitas. It is often reasonable
and even morally necessary to hide one's beliefs, and this, not
“deception”, is what Aquinas means by the “prudent
dissimulatio” he thinks justifiable in appropriate
contexts. But one should not do so by the spurious self-projection
entailed by asserting what one believes false. Pretended flight as a
device for luring an unjust enemy into an ambush can be right in a
just war, but lying to the enemy is wrong, although its gravity is
much diminished by the duty not to reveal the truth to the enemy, a
duty compatible with the coexisting duty not to lie. Subsequent
scholars in his tradition have wondered whether the conditions of
discourse with an unjust opponent do not, at least in many
circumstances, defeat the presumption that a grammatically indicative
statement asserts what it is put forward to seem to
assert.

Negative norms such as the three sets of norms just discussed are
more urgent and direct as implications of love of self and neighbor,
but are not necessarily more important in other dimensions of
importance. That is to say, they are applicable and to be followed
semper et ad semper, always and in all circumstances, whereas
the applicability of affirmative norms (requiring one to act
in a specified kind of way) is semper sed non ad semper:
always applicable subject to there being (as is not always the
case) suitable circumstances. Kinds of conduct that are contrary to a
negative moral norm of this type are “intrinsically
wrongful” (intrinsece mala).

Only negative norms can be exceptionless (and not all negative moral
norms are). If affirmative norms could be exceptionless, there would be
inescapable conflicts of obligation, but since morality is simply (the set of standards of) full
reasonableness, there can be no conflict of duties each truly
and inescapably obligatory in one and the same situation: one cannot
truly be perplexus simpliciter – that is, in a dilemma
such that, through no fault of one's own, any choice one makes
will be immoral. (It is, however, possible that my prior wrongful
choices or my culpable negligence in forming my conscience put me into
a situation such that I have applicable and irreconcilable duties and
will be in breach of one or more of them whatever I choose or do or
omit: I am then perplexus secundum quid, that is, in a dilemma
but of a qualified, derivative kind, only in a weak sense
unavoidable.)

A virtue is an aspect of, or constitutive element in, being a person
of good character. To have the virtues is to have a stable and ready
willingness to make choices that are morally good because in line with
the bonum rationis, the basic good of practical
reasonableness.

The virtues, like everything else in one's will, are a
response to reasons. But practical reasons (i.e. reasons for action)
are propositional: they can be stated as principles and other
standards, more or less specific. So principles, ultimately the first
principles of practical reason (that is, of natural law), are more
fundamental to ethics than virtues are. Aquinas accepts
Aristotle's notion that every virtue is a mean between too much
and too little, and he constantly stresses that it is reason — with
the principles and rules (regulae) it understands — that
settles the mean and thus determines what is too much or too little.
Indeed, the principles of practical reason (natural law) establish the
ends of the virtues: ST II-II q. 47 a. 6. And the master
virtue of bringing practical reasonableness into all one's
deliberations, choices, and carrying out of choices — the virtue
of prudentia, a virtue both intellectual (of one's
intelligence) and moral (of one's whole will and character)
— is part of the definition, content, and influence of
every other moral virtue: ST I-II q. 65 a. 1, q. 66 a. 3 ad 3,
etc.

Aquinas arranged the Summa Theologiae's exposition of
morality within a classification, not of the goods to which rational
acts are directed, nor of types of act, nor of practical reason's
standards, but of the virtues. Explicable as a reflective theological
project of depicting the flourishing or deviations of human beings in
an account of the whole movement of creature from their origin to their
fulfillment, his decision to adopt this superstructure has tended to
obscure the real foundations of his ethics. As one would expect from
the considerations sketched in the preceding paragraph, his actual
arguments about what is right and wrong, virtuous or vicious, get their
premises not from analysis of the virtues at stake but rather from the
principles and more specific standards, norms, precepts or rules of
practical reason(ableness). It is the conclusions of these arguments
that are then re-expressed in terms of what is contrary to or in line
with one or more of the virtues.

One's affirmative responsibilities are all conditioned by
circumstances, and mostly are (conditional) implications of the Golden
Rule of doing to or for others what you would wish them to do
to or for you. For both these reasons, one cannot make sound judgments
about what one should be doing – that is, about what is the
“mean” of reasonableness – unless one's wishes
are those of a person who understands the opportunities and the
circumstances well, and whose concerns and intentions are those of
someone whose reasonableness is not corrupted or deflected either by
sub-rational desires and aversions or by deformations of will such as
pride or presumption. Such a person has the virtues, intellectual and
moral, and virtue is thus, and in these respects, required for sound
moral judgment. Sometimes the mean of reason, properly assessed by
someone of true virtue, calls for heroic virtue (say, immense courage)
far beyond conventional measures or expectations of reasonableness,
moderation, and the like.

Aquinas firmly holds the Platonic-Aristotelian theses (i) of the
connexio virtutum: that to have any of the virtues in its full
and proper form one must have all of them, and (ii) of the governing
and shaping role of (the good of) practical reasonableness (bonum
rationis), that is, of the intellectual and moral virtue of
prudentia. For some indication why, see 4.4 below..

Just as some take Aquinas to hold that concern for one's own
happiness is the source of one's moral motivation and judgment,
so some take him to hold that the point of being virtuous is being
virtuous. But a sounder reading may understand him to hold that
attaining beatitudo and virtus are more like built-in
beneficial side-effects of openness to the beatitudo of
everyone – that is, of love of neighbor as oneself, according to
a reasonable order of priorities. What virtue (the state of character)
is praised for, he says, is its actualizing the good of
reason(ableness), and reason is good because it enables one to discern
things for what they truly are – and so, in the practical domain,
to discern real benefits (bona, opportunities) and direct
one's choices and actions to bringing them about in the real
people for whom one thereby makes effective one's love and
respect.

Aquinas accepts the Platonic-Aristotelian thesis that there are four
virtues which are cardinal, that is on which the moral life and all
other virtues hinge or depend: prudentia, justice, courage,
and temperantia. Each is a strategic element in one's
integrating of the good of practical reasonableness into one's
deliberations, choices and execution of choices (prudentia),
in one's dealings with others justice), and in integrating and
governing one's desires by genuine reasons (temperantia)
and enabling one to face down intimidating obstacles (courage, fortitudo).

Practical reasonableness involves not only (i) an intelligent and
rationally integrated understanding of practical reason's
principles and of the implications that, under the auspices of the
master principle of love of neighbor as self, they have in the form of
moral standards, but also (ii) the personal self-governance needed to
put those conscientious judgments into effect by choices and
corresponding action. So prudentia has many phases or, as
Aquinas says, parts, and enters into every other virtue. It is far
removed from “prudence” in the sense of “rational
self-interest”, for by prudentia one is actively aware
that self-interest is self-stunting or indeed self-destructive unless
one transcends it by one's dispositions and acts of justice and
friendship or love. (And see 2.7 above.)

Although Aquinas subscribes to Aristotle's thesis that
practical reasonableness (phronesis, prudentia)
concerns means rather than ends, he eliminates any quasi-Humeian
reading of that thesis by emphasizing that what “moves”
prudentia is not one's passions but one's
underivative understanding of the first practical principles and of the
intelligible goods to which they point (synderesis movet
prudentiam: ST II-II q. 47 a. 6 ad 3). Moreover, since he
holds that virtually all means are also ends, the Aristotelian thesis
in no way inhibits him from holding that prudentia is what
guides one in identifying moral standards and the “mean” of
every virtue: prudentia “directs the moral virtues not
only in choosing means but also in establishing ends”: I-II q. 66
a. 3 ad 3.

Justice is the steady and lasting willingness to give to others what
they are entitled to (their right: jus [or ius]
suum). Aquinas works with this Roman Law definition
(ST II-II q. 58 a. 1c), and with Aristotle's division of
justice into (i) distributive (good judgment about how to
divide up and parcel out beneficial or burdensome wholes or sets in a
way that is fair because guided by appropriate criteria) and (ii) what
Aquinas calls commutative justice (good judgment going far
wider than Aristotle's “corrective” justice, and
concerned with all other kinds of dealings between persons). His
prioritizing of the concept of right (jus), conceived as
something that belongs to another, brings him to the brink of
articulating a concept of human rights, a concept certainly implicit in
his thesis that there are precepts of justice each imposing, on me and my
communities, a duty to everyone without discrimination
(indifferenter omnibus debitum: ST II-II q. 122 a.
6). For his definition of justice immediately entails that correlative
to such duties of justice there must be rights that belong to everyone
indifferenter. Many duties of justice are positive
(affirmative duties to give, do, etc.), and Aquinas treats the duties
of relieving poverty both under justice and under love (of neighbor,
for God's sake). The duties in either case are essentially the
same, and Aquinas' understanding of them strongly affects his
understanding of justified private property rights, which are valid
because needed for prosperity and development, but are subject to a
duty to distribute, directly or indirectly, one's
superflua – that is, everything beyond what one
needs to keep oneself and one's family in the state of life
appropriate to one's (and their) vocation(s). For the natural
resources of the world are “by nature” common; that is,
reason's principles do not identify anyone as having a prior
claim to them other than under some customary or other socially posited
scheme for division and appropriation of such resources, and such
schemes could not be morally authoritative unless they acknowledged
some such duty to distribute one's superflua.

Though one's passions, that is one's emotional desires
and aversions, support one's reason in deliberation, choice and
action, they are also always capable of deflecting one from reasonable
and right choice. So the ready disposition to keep these passions in
their proper role is an essential element of a virtuous character and
life. By temperantia one integrates one's desires,
particularly but not only for sexual pleasure, with reason, lest reason
be enslaved by passion and become its ingenious servant, as it readily
can. Temperantia is the mean, for example, between lust and
frigidity or apathy (Aquinas everywhere rejecting any
“Stoic” ideal of passionlessness, and holding that there is
good as well as bad concupiscentia).

By fortitudo one keeps one's aversions, particularly
but not only fear, in check lest one shirk one's moral
responsibilities in situations of danger or other adversity. It is the
mean between recklessness or over-boldness and cowardice or
defeatism.

In recent decades various philosophers and theologians have proposed
that ethics done well is virtue ethics, not an ethics of rules and
principles. An ethics of the latter kind is denounced as legalistic. As
should be clear from the foregoing, Aquinas rejects the proposed
contrast and gives systematic prominence both to standards, such as
principles and rules, and to virtues. He holds, in effect, that they
are interdefined. Nor does he have any time for the view that there are
no exceptionless moral norms and that moral norms or other standards
are no more than a kind of anticipation, shadow or approximation of the
judgments which in each situation need to be made by a person of
virtue, and which could never exclude in advance any kind of
act as always wrongful by reason of its object and regardless of its
further intentions or the circumstances of the situation. On the
contrary, he holds that no human act is morally good (right, in the
sense of not wrong) unless it is in line with love of self and neighbor
(and thus with respect for the basic aspects of the wellbeing of each
and all human beings) not only (i) in the motives or intentions with
which it is chosen, and (ii) in the appropriateness of the
circumstances, but also (iii) in its object (more precisely the object,
or closest-in intention of the choosing person) (see 2.1.1 above). This
is the primary sense of the axiom he frequently articulates by quoting
an old tag: bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu
(good from an unflawed set of contributing factors, bad from any defect
in the set). That is, there is a fundamental asymmetry between moral
good and moral evil – a notion very foreign to any version of
utilitarian or post-utilitarian consequentialist or
“proportionalist” ethics.

Love of neighbor as oneself requires one to live in political
community with others. For the wellbeing and right(s) of all or almost
all of us are dependent upon there being in place institutions of
government and law of the relatively comprehensive kind we call
“political” and “state”.

“Common good” is very often a safer translation of
bonum commune than “the common good”. For there is
the common good of a team, but equally the common good of a university
class, of a university, of a family, of a neighborhood, of a city, of a
state, of a church and of human kind throughout the world. The
difference in each case between the group's common good and an
aggregate of the wellbeing of each of its members can be understood by
considering how, in a real friendship, A wills B's wellbeing for
B's sake, while B wills A's wellbeing for A's sake,
and each therefore has reason to will his or her own wellbeing for the
other's sake, with the result that neither envisages his or her
own wellbeing as the source (the object) of the friendship's
value, and each has in view a truly common good, not reducible
to the good of either taken separately or merely summed. Inasmuch as
there is possible and appropriate a kind of friendship between the
members of each of the kinds of group listed (non-exhaustively) above,
each such group has its own common good.

Communities such as those just mentioned are groups, each of them a
whole [totum] made up of persons (and perhaps of other
groups), their unity being not merely one of composition or conjunction
or continuity, but rather of order, in two dimensions: (i) of
the parts (members) as coordinating with each other, and (ii) of the
group and its members to its organizing purpose or end
(finis). Of these, (ii) is the more explanatory, as Aquinas
argues at the very beginning of his commentary on Aristotle's
Ethics.

Some of the above-listed kinds of group have, in Aquinas'
view, a significance that is in a sense strategic. In particular, the
family-cum-household, the political group, and the church established
to transmit divine revelation and salvation each have such
significance. The benefits made possible by political community, with
its state government and law, are such that its common good is both
extensive and intensive in its reach and implications (e.g. the
legitimacy of securing it by coercion). So on those occasions when
“the common good” is the best translation of bonum
commune, the referent will normally be the good of the political
community in question (or of political communities generically), often
called by Aquinas public good.

Nevertheless, Aquinas's use of the Aristotelian axiom,
“human beings are naturally political animals” almost
always takes it as asserting our social, not solitary, nature –
our need for interpersonal relationships both for friendship and for
such necessities as food, clothing, speech, and so forth. So the axiom
should not be made to mean that Aquinas thinks there is a distinct
basic inclination towards, or a distinct basic good, of political
community, to put alongside the distinct basic good of marriage and
family. He accepts that we are naturally parts of a political
community, but also that we are more naturally conjugal than political
(in the narrow sense), and that political community does not properly
have the ultimacy it has for Aristotle. For Aquinas, political
communities have been irrevocably relativized by the appropriateness
for (in principle) everyone of belonging to the Church which is, in its
own way, as complete [perfecta] a kind of community as any
state.

Moreover, Aristotle's claim that the polis is
“greater and more godlike” than any other human community
is put by Aquinas into a horizon which contains not merely the one
civitas (Latin for polis) of which I am a
member but rather the whole plurality of peoples and civitates
(states, political communities): Eth. VIII.4.11–12. So for him
the common good that is the ultimate concern of political philosophy,
and thus of the reasonable person, is nothing less than the fulfillment
of all human persons and communities (and see 3.2 above).

Still, this wider perspective does not lead Aquinas to develop a
theory of international community; this had to be developed by his
sixteenth-century followers. Indeed, he takes remarkably little
interest in a number of important issues related to the plurality of
states and the dynamics of state-formation, and the appropriate
relationship between a people [populus, gens, etc.]
and a state (should each people presumptively have a state?). His
political philosophy explores with subtlety and care the state
[civitas, regnum, etc.], almost as if there were
simply a single permanent political community.

The state is a “complete community”, whose members, in
the central case, are also members of another “complete
community”, the Church. So this completeness is, in each case,
relative and delimited. Correspondingly, the state's governing
structures (which Aquinas does not call “the state”) are
– again in the central, morally proper case – limited in
four distinct ways.

(i) State governments and laws are subject to moral standards,
especially but not only the principles and norms of justice. This does
not mean that moral principles all apply to public authority in the way
they do to private persons; they do not, yet there is no exemption of
public authorities from the exceptionless moral norms against
intentionally killing the innocent, lying, rape and other extra-marital
sex, and so forth. Moreover, this limitation has no bearing on the
distinct question which moral standards should, or can properly, be
legally enforced by the state's government and law (see (iii)
below).

(ii) State governments are subject to laws governing election or
other appointment to and tenure and rotation of office, and the
jurisdiction of particular offices. Even supreme rulers not subject to
the coercive authority of anyone else cannot dispense themselves from
the obligation of their own laws unless that is for the common good and
free from favoritism. If they defy these moral restrictions they show
themselves to be tyrants, and may be resisted and deposed by the
concerted (“public”) action of their people. The best form
of government (or as we would now say, constitution) is one in which,
“well mixed”, are found “monarchy”,
“aristocracy” and “democracy”, that is, the
rule of one person (whose “monarchy” is probably
better elective rather than hereditary), governing in concert with a
few high officials chosen for their excellence of character
and aptitude, by an electorate comprising the many who are
entitled both to vote and to stand for election: ST I-II q.
105 a. 1. Establishing and maintaining such an arrangement is a matter
for laws which delimit the competences of all concerned.

(iii) State governments and laws have the authority and duty to
promote and defend the common good, including the good of virtue. This
responsibility brings with it the authority to use coercion for the
suppression of crime and enemy attack. This coercive jurisdiction
extends to defending persons and property both by force and by the
credible threat of punishment for criminal or other unjust
appropriation or damage. But it does not extend to enforcing any part
of morality other than the requirements of justice insofar as
they can be violated by acts external to the choosing and
acting person's will. Acts of virtues (or vices) other than such
external acts of inter-personal (in)justice cannot rightly be
prohibited unless they involve (in)justice. For, unlike divine
law's, “human law's purpose is the temporal
tranquility of the state, a purpose which the law attains by coercively
prohibiting external acts to the extent that these evils can
disturb the peaceful state of the state.” ST I-II q. 98
a. 1c; likewise q. 100 a. 2c: “human law does not put forward
precepts about anything other than acts of justice [and
injustice]”. State law's justifiedly coercive domain is not
private good as such, nor the whole of the community's common
good. Rather, it is those aspects of the political community's
common good that can be called public good, and that are affected by
external acts directly or indirectly affecting other members of the
community.

(iv) The morally significant authority of the state's
government and law is limited by the rights of the Church, though when
that government and law are within their proper domain, one ought to
comply with their directives rather than any purported act of
administration or government (apart from general moral teaching) by
Pope or bishops.

The last three kinds of limitation can be considered here in a
little more detail.

Government is properly speaking “political” when the
supreme person or body “has power which is limited
[potestas coarctata or limitata] by certain laws
of the state”: Pol. I.1.5. Such rulers govern in
accordance with the laws concerning the establishment of their office,
their appointment and their responsibilities. When power is, by
contrast, “plenary”, the government is said to be
“regal” in kind. But even regal government, in its proper
forms, is the government of free and equal people who have in some
sense (never made quite clear by Aquinas) the “right to resist
[ius repugnandi]” the ruler(s). Even regal rulers are
subject to the directive force of the laws, though there is no-one who
has the legal authority to coerce them.

Aquinas sees no need for any “social contract” to
explain or justify the origins of government or of any particular
regime. But he does think that, even in regal as distinct from
political rule, the enacted laws constitute “a kind of covenant
[pactum] between king and people” (In Rom. 13.1
v. 6), and violation of this by the ruler can entail that subjects are
released from their covenantal obligation.

In principle, Aquinas thinks, the supreme legislative powers are held
either by the whole people [tota multitudo], a free people
[libera multitudo], or by some public persona who
has responsibility [cura] for them and represents them
[gerit personam multitudinis: bears their persona]: I-II
q. 97 a. 3 ad 3; II-II q. 57 a. 2. Neither the meaning of this
“representation” nor the practicalities of designating a
representative are explored in any depth by Aquinas. Nor does he
discuss how it gets settled whether a particular people is (i) simply
free and self-governing, or (ii) free but subject to the legislative
authority of some princeps, or (iii) unfree (perhaps because
conquered).

Though he never openly confronts them, Aquinas sets aside the
sayings at the end of Aristotle's Ethics which seem to
mean that the polis has the responsibility and role of
coercively leading all its citizens, of every age, towards all-round
virtue. Aquinas plainly rejects the idea that the state is a surrogate
for paternal authority, or has God's authority over morally
significant conduct. Though he frequently states that the political
rulers have a proper concern to lead people to virtue, these statements
turn out to refer to the appropriate aspirations of rulers, not to
their coercive jurisdiction or authority. In the context of the
surrounding argument, the statements do not commit him to any wider
governmental or legal authority than to require and foster the public
good and the virtue of justice, that is, the willingness to perform
one's duties to others: 6.1(iii) above. The other
virtues can be legally required of citizens only so far as they
impact on justice: ST I-II q. 96 a. 3. Moreover, he holds the
classic position that doing justice does not require that one's
motivations and character be just. And when it comes to coercive
measures, he holds that they can bear only upon conduct that is
external and immediately or mediately affects other people unjustly or
disturbs the peace of the political community: ST I-II q. 98
a. 1. Really private vices are outside the coercive jurisdiction of the
state's government and law. Though political authority is
ultimately derived from divine authority, it is not to be exercised in
the same all-encompassing way as God does when directing one (like
every other human individual) to the complete and heavenly fulfillment
gratuitously and supernaturally offered to us all by God. Absolute
political authority of the kind later claimed by rulers such as James I
of England is contrary to Aquinas' constant teaching.

This reading of Aquinas as, in a nineteenth and twentieth century
jargon, “a liberal” (or “the first Whig”) is
often disputed, for there are statements in his writings which taken
acontextually seem to assert the simpler and paternalistic Aristotelian
position.

One of the reasons why Aquinas' political theory departs
significantly from Aristotle's is that Aquinas believes he has
access to facts and considerations unavailable to Aristotle, namely to
the public divine revelation completed in the works and sayings of
Christ, founder of a spiritual community, the (Catholic =
“universal”) Church. When political life is really
well-ordered, therefore, each member (citizen) of a state will be also
a member of this other “complete community” and subject to
its laws as well as to the state's. The function of this other
community is to transmit the divine promise or offer of eternal life,
and to help people help each other, through their own individual free
choices, to become ready for that life. With the establishing of this
community (in continuity and discontinuity with the older religious
community of Israel), human associations are henceforth of two
fundamentally distinct types: (i) temporal or secular, worldly, civil,
or political, and (ii) spiritual. Correspondingly, responsibility for
human affairs is divided between (i) secular societies, especially
states and families, and (ii) the Church. The distinction between
secular and spiritual tracks that between natural and revealed
knowledge.

Accordingly, the Church's leaders have no jurisdiction over
secular matters, although they can declare that the choice of a member
of the Church, albeit in a secular matter, is seriously immoral. A
parent has no jurisdiction over a child's free choices except in
so far as they violate the moral rights of other members of the family
or the parents' responsibility for the child's education
and moral upbringing. State government and law have no right to direct
the Church's leaders, or its members in their religious affairs,
except in so far as the state's peace and justice would
otherwise be violated. “In those matters which pertain to
political good [bonum civile], secular rather than spiritual
authority should be obeyed.” Sent. II d. 44 ex. ad
4.

Neither those who adhere to the old, incomplete revelation (Jews),
nor those people and peoples who simply do not accept the truth of the
full revelation, are subject to the authority of the Church. Nor is the
legitimacy and authority of a government negated by the fact that its
members (officials) are unbelievers.

Beyond this, Aquinas works within the constitutional assumptions of
the Christendom of his era. His positions imply that if ecclesiastical
authorities expel members from the Church for their misdeeds as rulers,
the consequences under their particular state's own
constitutional arrangement could include the rulers'
deposition (loss of secular legal authority); but Aquinas blurs or
elides this distinction of jurisdictions, and loosely says that the
Church “has the authority of curbing secular rulers”
(ST II-II q. 12 a. 2 ad 1).

Aquinas accepts the teaching of the Church of his era that no one
can rightly be compelled to accept the Christian faith or membership of
the Church, but that those who are members can and should be compelled
by both ecclesiastical and state law to abstain from any public
renunciation of it. He treats such renunciation as an actionable breach
of promise (passing silently over the fact that in most cases the
promise was made not by the persons concerned but rather, in their
early infancy, by their parents). And he regards public teaching of
heresy as comparable to counterfeiting coin of the realm and therefore
rightly punishable capitally by the secular authorities (the fact of
false teaching having been ascertained by an ecclesiastical trial). His
views about this matter are explicitly based on the evolving tradition
of the Church and on what historical experience suggested were the
effects of more permissive political or legal arrangements. So there
are no theoretical obstacles to his ready acceptance of the judgment of
later theologians and Church teachers that, as experience shows, it is
more compatible with basic positions in his moral and political
philosophy to hold that authentically personal judgment and freely
chosen commitment are so important in relation to ultimate questions
that all persons (even those whose beliefs about religion are false or
ill-formed) have a moral right, and should have the corresponding legal
right, to be free from state (and ecclesiastical) coercion in religious
belief or action except in so far as their conduct would be contrary to
the rights of others or to public peace or to public morality (that is,
morality so far as it concerns actions which impact on the public)
(Second Vatican Council, Declaration on Religious Liberty
(1965)). Nor is it clear how he could resist the objection that, even
if those baptized in infancy ratify the promises made on their behalf
at baptism, the subscription of faith is not an undertaking to other
people or the community, but rather is a matter which, as he says in a
neglected passage elsewhere in his major writings (ScG III c.
80 n. 15), “pertains to that person alone as an individual
[secundum se ipsum].”

The best developed part of Aquinas' political theory is his
account of law. That account's main features may be summarized in
four propositions about the central case and focal meaning of law. It
is a matter of intelligent direction addressed to the intelligence and
reason of those whom it directs. It is for the common good of a
political community. It is made (positum, put in place) by the
ruler(s) responsible for the community in question. It needs to be
coercive.

Aquinas' well-known discussion of law in ST I-II qq.
90–97 (a discussion which actually extends through the less studied qq.
98–105) has been justly admired by jurists and other thinkers not
otherwise much interested in his work. But it is shaped by his concern
there (i) to present for beginner students of theology an overview of
the universe and of the vast sweep of creatures out from their divine
creator and back to the same transcendent being as their ultimate
destiny, and (ii) to synthesize the traditional vocabulary and classic
theological sources on law. So prominence is there given to the
“eternal law” by which God governs even inanimate creatures
(as by the laws of physics, etc.), and to the
“participation” of natural moral law in that eternal law.
But when he is free from these textbookish constraints he emphasizes
that law's most essential feature is something which is not true
of the laws of nature (physics, biology, etc.), namely that it is an
appeal to the mind, choice, moral strength (virtus) and love
of those subject to the law: ScG III cc. 114–117; this is
quietly indicated also in ST I-II q. 91 a. 2 ad 3.

Law (in its central case and focal meaning) is thus always a plan for co-ordination through free
cooperation. The structure of things being what it is, the principles
of practical reason and morality (natural moral law and natural right)
can be understood, accepted, and lived by, as fully directive in
conscience, without needing to be regarded as (what they really are) an
appeal from mind to mind, a plan — freely made
to be freely adopted — for integral human fulfillment. As the divine
creator was in no way constrained to choose to create this universe as
distinct from any other good possible universe, so human legislators
have wide moral freedom to choose amongst alternative possible legal
arrangements, making one set of provisions legally and (presumptively)
morally obligatory by the sheer fact of adopting it – that is, by
what Aquinas calls the law-makers' determinatio: I-II q.
95 a. 2; q. 99 a. 3 ad 2; q. 104 a. 1..

The definition of law offered by Aquinas in ST I-II q. 90
a. 4 is: “an ordinance of reason for the common good of a
[complete] community, promulgated by the person or body responsible for
looking after that community.” It is by being intended for common
good that law appeals to its subjects' reason, and gives them
reason for regarding the law as authoritative and obligatory, morally
as well as legally. Even when its subjects or some of them would have
made or preferred a different determinatio, a different way of
pursuing communal benefit, the rulers' intent to promote common
good supports and is supported by their claim to rulership. Only if
they have such intent can they instantiate the central case of
government.

The central case of government is the rule of a free people, and law
is centrally instantiated when its fully public character
(promulgation: q. 90 a. 4), and its clarity (q. 95 a.3), generality (q.
96 a. 1), stability (q. 97 a. 2), and practicability (q. 95 a. 3),
enable government (law-makers and law-maintainers alike) and subjects
to be partners in
public reason (Aquinas has the concept though not the phrase). The features of law thus itemized by Aquinas amount to
the concept of the Rule of Law, which he clearly gives a priority over
the “rule of men” in his treatment of judges'
subordination to legislation and of the duty of judges to adhere to law
even against the evidence of their own eyes (when that evidence is not
legally admissible): II-II q. 67 a. 2; q. 64 a. 6 ad 3.

The person or body that “has the care of the community”
is entitled to make laws. Aquinas treats all human law as
“posited” and (synonymously) “positive”, even
those of its rules that are restatements of, or authoritatively
promulgated deductions (conclusiones) from, general
moral principles or norms. Interpretation, too, Aquinas thinks of as
involving, in the last analysis, an appeal to the legislator(s) to
declare what the enacted law truly means.

The making of law by custom is not incompatible with this thesis; it
amounts to a positing of law by the people, considered as having a
diffused authority and responsibility for their own community.

Even in a paradise unflawed by any human vice, there would, Aquinas
thinks, have been need for government and for law, though not
necessarily “political” government, still less coercive
law. For social life needs a considerable amount of common policy and
common action which cannot otherwise than by authoritative
determinatio be achieved by a group whose members have many
ideas – perhaps all of them good – about priorities and
ways to proceed: ST I q. 96 a. 4. A determinatio, if
it is just and fit to be authoritative, must have a rational connection
to principles of practical reasonableness. But that rational connection
is like an architect's decisions about dimensions; they must be
rationally connected to the terms of the commission (e.g. to build a
maternity hospital, not a lion's cage) but these terms, while
excluding various options, leave many options entirely open (the doors
must be more than 1 foot high but as between 7.1 and 7.2 feet the
choice is entirely free, and likewise with every dimension, selection
of materials, colors, and so forth).

In a world (paradise) of saints (completely virtuous persons), there
would be need for law but not for coercion; so coercion is not part of
Aquinas's definition of law and law's directive force can
be contrasted with its coercive force (and see 6.1(ii) above). But in
our actual world the need for (the threat of) coercion is such that
Aquinas will say without qualification that law ought to have coercive
force [vis coactiva] as well as directive [vis
directiva]; he even says that it is a characteristic of law
[de ratione legis] (ST I-II q. 96 a. 5), despite not
including it in his official definition of law's nature [its
ratio] (q. 90. a. 3).

It is not quite accurate to say that the state or its government has a
monopoly of force, since one can justifiably use force as a citizen to
defend oneself or others from an attack or assault that is not itself
justified (being criminal or insane), and this requires no
authorization. Still, Aquinas insistently draws a distinction between
private and public use of force. Only public authority can punish or
rightly engage in war, and it is reasonable for public authorities to
seek a virtual monopoly on what would now be called police operations
for the prevention, suppression, and detection of crime. Private
persons can never rightly intend precisely to harm or kill, though
they can knowingly bring about harm or death as a proportionate
side-effect of intending to block an attack (3.4.1 above). Persons
with public authority can, Aquinas thinks, rightly intend to kill (or
injure) in the exercise of their duty to suppress the attacks of
criminals, pirates, and other public or private enemies. (He does not
explore those borderland or badland — “wild west”
— situations where the distinction between public and private is
indistinct.)

The paradigmatic public use of coercion is judicially imposed
punishment, capital or otherwise. At the core of Aquinas's
account of justified punishment is the notion that offenders are
punishable because, in choosing to offend, they have excessively
indulged their will and thereby (he implies) gained a kind of advantage
over those who have retrained their own wills from such excess; a just
relationship between themselves and their fellow citizens can fittingly
be restored by proportionately imposing upon such offenders something
contra voluntatem, contrary to and suppressive of their will:
I-II q. 46 a. 6 ad 2. This restoration of a fair balance between
offenders and the law-abiding is central to what Aquinas frequently
calls the “medicinal” function of punishment, for the
medicine of punishment is intended to heal not only offenders (by
reforming them) or potential offenders (by deterring them), but also
and more centrally the whole community by rectifying the disorder of
injustice created by the offender's self-preferential violation
of justice. On capital punishment see 3.4.1 above.

Aquinas regards as legitimate ground for going to war not only the
defence of this or another political community, but also the purpose of
justly punishing and/or securing compensation. (As justifiable grounds
for use of force, it is difficult to distinguish between (i) defence of
one's own community's (or another's) territory and
constitution, (ii) the recovery or restoration of unjustly taken
territory or other possessions, and (iii) exaction of compensation for
unjust takings or other injuries.)

If the law purports to require actions that no-one should ever do,
it cannot rightly be complied with; one's moral obligation is not
to obey but to disobey: ST I-II q. 96 a. 4. And if it purports
to authorize such acts (e.g. rape, theft, or infanticide), its
authorization is morally void and of no effect (II-II q. 57 a. 2 ad 2);
courts should not guide their adjudications by such laws (II-II q. 60
a. 5 ad 1). But law's obligatoriness and authority is subject to
further conditions, derived from the very nature and rationale of
political authority. If the law-makers (i) are motivated not by concern
for the community's common good but by greed or vanity (private
motivations that make them tyrants, whatever the content of their
legislation), or (ii) act outside the authority granted to them, or
(iii) while acting with a view to the common good apportion the
necessary burdens unfairly, their laws are unjust and in the forum of
reasonable conscience are not so much laws as acts of violence
[magis sunt violentiae quam leges]: I-II q. 96 a. 4. Such laws
lack moral authority, i.e. do not bind in conscience; one is neither
morally obliged to conform nor morally obliged not to conform.

This conclusion is subject to a proviso or exception: laws which are
unjust by reason of one or more of these three enumerated types of
defect in authority sometimes create an obligation in conscience just
to the extent that disobedience would cause disorder or give the kind
of ‘example’ that leads others into wrongdoing. To avoid
those sorts of unjust harm to public and private good one may have a
moral obligation to forgo one's right(s) [iuri suo debet
cedere]. This obligation is not: to comply with the law according
to its makers' intent, and/or to the meaning it has under the
particular legal system's interpretative canons. Rather, it is a
kind of collateral obligation: to avoid those acts of non-compliance
that would unjustly risk having the bad side-effects of being seen not
to comply.

All who govern in the interests of themselves rather than of the
common good are tyrants, for that is what a tyrant is in the classical
line of thought followed by Aquinas. Tyranny entails treating
one's subjects as slaves – persons used for the benefit of
the master. The laws of tyrants are not laws simpliciter, but
rather a kind of perversion of law [perversitas legis], and
one is, in principle, entitled to treat them as one treats a
bandit's demands: I-II q. 92 a 1 ad 4 & 5; II-II q. 69 a. 4.
Against the regime's efforts to enforce its decrees one has the
right of forcible resistance; as a private right this could extend as
far as killing the tyrant as a foreseen side-effect of one's
legitimate self-defence. It is the tyrant rather than the subject who
is morally guilty of sedition. If one can associate with others to
constitute oneself with them a kind of public authority willing and
able to assume responsibility for the common good of the state, one is
entitled, in Aquinas' view, to set about overthrowing, and if
need be executing, the tyrant, with a view to the liberatio of
the people [multitudinis] and the homeland [patriae].
Since rulers who are not tyrants are entitled to hunt down and most
severely punish sedition, and both rulers and subjects may fall into
error about each other's moral status, subjects ought to be slow
to judge a tyranny so unjust that overthrowing or forcibly resisting it
is fair to those likely to be injured as a side-effect of revolutionary
struggle; there is a (defeasible) presumption in favor of acquiescence
and merely passive disobedience: II-II q. 42 a. 2 ad 3, q. 104 a. 6 ad
3; II Sent. d. 44 q. 2 a. 2; Reg. 1.6.

–––, 1997, “The Good of Marriage and the
Morality of Sexual Relations: Some Philosophical and Historical
Observations”, American Journal of Jurisprudence, 42:
97–134; also in Finnis 2011, III, 334–352.

–––, 1998, Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal
Theory, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

–––, 2011, Collected Essays of John
Finnis, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, five
volumes.

Corpus Thomisticum,
provides a sound working Latin text of the works of Thomas Aquinas
(without annotations or other apparatus, but fully searchable). It is based, so far as they
have been completed, on the critically edited Omnia Opera begun by the Leonine
Commission in 1879/1882; c. 20 of the projected c. 50 volumes remain to
be published, and the works thus not yet critically edited are given online in what are thought to be the best existing editions.

The SEP would like to congratulate the National Endowment for the Humanities on its 50th anniversary and express our indebtedness for the five generous grants it awarded our project from 1997 to 2007.
Readers who have benefited from the SEP are encouraged to examine the NEH’s anniversary page and, if inspired to do so, send a testimonial to neh50@neh.gov.